On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.

Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.

https://hexbear.net/

I respect that you work in the arts. However, I think too many people worried about copyright think that things would look similar to the way they are today, but the situation would be radically different without copyright. For example, Disney wouldn’t exist. You wouldn’t have large corporations taking and not giving back, because those large corporations wouldn’t exist like they do now in the first place.

Not the person you’re asking, but I’d say yes. Don’t bother charging for bits, except for something like the bandcamp model, i.e. “yes, i could pirate this but i want to support the creator and it’s really easy to do so”.

We have better funding models now that we’ve solved the problem of copying at zero cost. Patreon is a good and popular one, as well as kickstarters. You can’t pirate something that doesn’t get made, which is the perfect solution. Other art like music also makes money off of things like live performances that can’t be digitized.

Note that the one aspect of copyright that I like is attribution requirements. I think it’s perfectly fine to hand out information to anyone, as long as you say “here’s this cool thing, this is who created it, and this is how you can give them money”.

I’d be fine with copyright going away altogether. People sometimes object to this on the grounds of “But Disney will just steal your ideas and make money off of them”. If their works don’t have copyright though, you can do the same right back to them.

This is also one reason that I appreciate generative AI. Short-term, yes it will help Disney and the like. Slightly longer-term, why would anyone give Disney money if you can generate your own Marvel movie yourself?

The genie also isn’t going back in the bottle. Copyright is a dead man walking. If you dislike what large companies like Disney are doing/going to do with generative AI, push for anyone training a model to be forced to let anyone whose work went into that model for free.

The original duration in the U.S. was 14 years, plus the option of a renewal for another 14. IMO we should move back to something close to that. One idea I’ve seen is that there’s an initial cost of however much for 7 years, and then the price doubles for every 7 year extension beyond that. Not even Disney can beat exponential growth, and it would force them to pick what they actually care about.

I’d also prefer explicit registration. We’re losing too many works because nobody’s sure who owns the copyright, and nobody knows if it’s safe to archive them.

I’d say that the original Star Wars trilogy should be public domain by now, for a concrete example. Disney can make new stories and characters in the universe and make money off of them, but everyone else should be able to as well.

Also as an aside, here’s Richard Stallman on why the term “intellectual property” shouldn’t be used. It’s an umbrella term that doesn’t really make sense, and more explicit terms like copyright or patents or trademark should be used.

From here:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

I think !shortstories@literature.cafe would be a good place for it. The community sidebar says your own stories are welcome. You might want to add that you’re specifically looking for feedback

deleted by creator

I’m pretty meh on the arguments there. It would be different, but we’d adapt. And we’d fix a lot bunch of problems.

The difference is that you’re not changing how time is kept. Countries can change their timezone offsets right now to screwy things like +12:45 and it changes how time is recorded and stored. If we switch to UTC, a country can just declare their official hours are shifting and nobody has to fundamentally change how clocks work.

IMO people would figure it out and life would go on. Yes, lots of people would have the calendar date advance in the middle of the day but that’s fine, we’d get used to it. People wouldn’t work 9-5 jobs, but we’d come up with different terminology.

I don’t really see the argument about people waking up at different times. Yeah, some people would wake up at 02:00 and some at 16:00, but when someone says they wake up at 02:00, there’s 0 confusion about when that is. You’d have to know when someone is awake to do an international call, but you have to do that anyways.

Those verses don’t conflict with evolution. They don’t conflict with anything, because they don’t mean anything. What scientific advancements happened because of those verses? None, because science advanced to the point where we understood how evolution works, and some religious people copied their homework and went looking for meaning after the fact. If those verses meant something, there would have been centuries of progress on evolution before Darwin. There wasn’t.

There’s plenty of things you can convince me of, you just have to provide evidence, which you haven’t done.

What could I say that would sway you into realizing that your religion is as silly as the rest? If the answer is nothing under the sun, then you’re using a cheap rhetorical trick of projecting your intellectual shortcomings onto other people in order to make yourself feel better about them.

He designed you then made your design better. He formed you then made your forms better. We created them and strengthened their forms.

That’s not how any of this works. None of these require the process of biological evolution, they’re clearly written as the islamic equivalent of intelligent design. Those describe some wizard creating something and then working to make it better, which is the opposite of how biological evolution works. Relying on “evolves” having several different meanings (evolves (strengthens in its form)) is not an argument that is made in good faith. The process of biological evolution is not described in any religious literature, including yours.

And Allah has created from water every living creature

I assume you bolded this because it’s important somehow. It’s not, though. It’s a vague allegory that has no predictive power, is not science, and has nothing to do with the process of biological evolution.

At some point you’re advocating for Deism. Which is fine enough, but doesn’t really provide any satisfactory answers. You need to define exactly what you mean by “God” before any further useful conversation can be had.

The scientific process, including evolution, has dispelled the myths found in any religious textbook ever written, including their particular definitions of “God”. I’d suggest you just drop the word and the associated baggage, and start from scratch. Come up with a new word, and define properties for it that make a coherent argument.

Better than Dreamworks, though

Watching Parks & Rec for the first time, and I also noticed this. IMO it’s missing something, maybe if only one of the characters acted that way towards him or something it would be better. He’s pretty much Meg from Family Guy, and I never really cared for that dynamic either.

I think it works there because it’s just Michael Scott that despises him, everyone else sees him as fairly normal from what I recall.